Yesterday afternoon, the industry lost a legendary director to a pulmonary embolism at the very young age of 49. In these quotes from conversations with Luke Ford, DAC (as he was known in the industry) summarized his career thusly:

I graduated from Rutgers with a double major in journalism and art. Once I found out that I couldn’t paint or draw, I decided to become a serious journalist. I wrote for two years for the Dow Jones news service in New Jersey, then switched to Genesis in 1988 and wrote for a friend, Michael Banka. He was my college roommate who now edited Genesis. I was bored and looking for something else to write about other than planning commission meetings and human interest stories on missing children, gun shows, etc. From there I went on to Screw.

I’m down here [in Los Angeles] for two reasons. One, to make a better life for myself. Two, to prove a point. All these posturing idiots who think of themselves as great artists and brilliant filmmakers are by and large full of it… As a critic, when I decided to review pornography, I decided to give my subjects a certain benefit of the doubt and approach it as pornography…And take my critical standards from there, rather than compare it to a higher form of art. What distressed me is that many people I praised for being moderately talented, read my praise and mistook it for my saying that they were the equivalent of Francis Ford Coppola, or Orson Welles or David Cronenberg. Being a film nut, I’d look for parallels.

A quirky guy and serious director with a great admiration for Asian women, DAC will be missed.

Videobox’s collection of his films is by no means complete, but below is (what I think is) a listing of every DAC movie we offer for folks interested in seeing his work.

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5 Responses to “David Aaron Clark: RIP”

I first met David in 97. He had this really unique film he did called Asainatrix. It featured Japanese girls doing B&D lesbian play, including a very hot scene with milk and a really cool sound track. I hadn’t seen anything like it at the time. (The only thing close would have been “Fashionistas” seven years later) He really understood sensual eroticism in a niche that obviously turned him on. Which I think is an important point. Unlike most directors today who are just filming to make a paycheck, he only filmed what he liked and had a personal connection to.

I remember at one point a few years ago he was taking the bus in LA to get to his locations for shooting because he wouldn’t take the cookie cutter porn jobs. Not the glamorous lifestyle some people imagine.

What is really sad about losing DAC is he seemed to finally have found a home at Evil Angel with his first title with them “Pure” receiving multiple nominations. It looked like he was going to have a breakthrough in the industry.

Take some time and go through his stuff I doubt everything he has done is a masterpiece but I bet you find something unique in this collection.

There is so much really poor porn produced that you have to be sad when a porn director with talent dies. Not all of Clark’s work was to my taste, but it was never nondescript or boring. At least it sounds like he left a really good movie behind him with Pure and that will be something to remember him by.

As a bit of a bargain hunter, I was always a couple of years behind on everything, but Asianatrix was one I saw pretty close to release time (rented and then purchased from Frenchy’s in SF) and it pretty well blew me away – I’d known his reviews and stuff from Screw before that, but I’ve been a fan of his directing ever since.

I don’t think I ever copied the Asianatrix VHS to DVD, but if I can find it in the giant tub-o-porn it’s definitely time to do so. In the meanwhile, I’ve got a bunch the Hustler’s Asian Fever series, where in the scenes he shot (in the earlier discs often mixed in with the less-well-produced, albeit with much fresher girls shot in Asia stuff the series became known for a while) he proves that he can put a really deliciously nasty spin on “mainstream” porn, aside from the kinkier stuff he also produced.

Plus the VB scenes of his – the scene he shot with Jade Blue Eclipse (and himself) on “Diary of a Mad Porn Director” is a another good place to start…

Mister Handy – I tried to get the rights of Asainatrix from DAC a few years back. Long and short of it is, he was hired by Mark Powers owner of a play club you may be aware of called The PowerStation. My understanding is Mark never made back his initial investment and they had a falling out. I tried tracking Mark down but he has fallen off the grid so to speak (and now goes by Marcella). Another lost classic?? Who knows this stuff has a habit of resurfacing

*** A side note if any of you ever watched any RedBoard titles from the late 90’s with Kym Wilde 80% of it was filmed at The PowerStation